Tracking bad guys while not breaking a nail

How have female bounty hunters become a feature of the modern world? Three developments appear to have made it inevitable: Google, GPS and Taser.

That's what the fine art of freelance outlaw wrangling has come to. It's not just breaking motel doors and roughing up cousins anymore. Intelligence gathering, it seems, can now be done with French nail tips on a smart-looking keyboard. Retrieve a mama's or a girlfriend's name - or so we learn in the premiere of Court TV's enlightening, specious and rabid Bounty Girls Miami - and you're halfway there.

"An expert on GPS systems," as Gloria, one of the stars of this reality series, is called in the program notes, might then aid your cause. She presumably is exceptionally sensitive to the arcane advice offered by a global positioning system. You know, like, "Turn left on Ocean Drive."

With the address of the fugitive's girlfriend, the bondswomen dig in for a stakeout. The big drama surrounds whether they can make their creepily urgent bathroom breaks. Incontinence, it seems, would not go well with the job.

The bounty girls, whose Miami workplace is called the Sunshine State Bonds Agency, also score the address of their quarry. To get in, though, they don't flex muscle - though they do have muscles, or at least the upper-body gym contours that suggest casting calls more than careers giving uppercuts and full nelsons. Instead they put on makeup and dresses and go door to door with an odd ruse, something about needing to find their man because his dog is going to be put to sleep.

The only problem with this meekness thing is that it fails, at least initially. Almost no doors open with the dying-dog scam. All the while the full name and mug shot of the would-be outlaw flash so often on Bounty Girls Miami that the man's guilt becomes not just presumed but embellished. There's more than a little lynch mob in the perkily packaged crew.

The women share an unforced rapport, but Jag, their middle-aged leader, is obsessed above all with getting her pelts. She's also got a sharp eye out for weakness in the group. Clyde, a former Marine who looks especially young, is vulnerable, and doesn't roll with the girls in the second episode. Rounding out the group is Jade, a slightly flaky woman whose sphinx-like appearance seems just right for a real bounty hunter.

But this show is not the place to look for real bounty hunters. You knew that, didn't you?